Wipe A Stolen Android Phone

Background

Dolapo lost her phone last week. The phone contains the video of an AGA sponsors’ private meeting. She didn't use a password on her phone, which means that someone could easily access her data and put her at risk. However, she can still delete the contents on the phone so that the thief can’t access any information.

Wiping your data from your Android phone

Sometimes things like the above happen and we have to resort to extreme measures like wiping all of the data from our phones to address the situation. If your phone is lost and you’re afraid that someone might access your data, you may have no other choice than to do this. If it comes to this, you have to act quickly before you lose the one chance you have to connect to your phone remotely and delete your data. As long as your Android phone is connected to your Google account and to the Internet, you have a good chance.

Wipe the data from your Android device using the Android Device Manager

Android Device Manager is the tool that Google uses to track Android device users. Logging in to your device through your Google account will enable you locate or wipe the device. To verify that you’reconnectedto your Google account, check if you have Google calendar entries, e-mail messages on your Gmail account, or if you’ve usedGoogle Drive through your device. If the answer is yes to any of these, then you’re connected.

Now, Google created restrictions to prevent people from mistakenly losing their data. One of these is disabling the ‘Remote lock and erase‘ function on your device, which you’ll have to enable yourself.

To enable the feature, go to your Android Device Manager and log in with your Google account. The system will then attempt to connect to and find your device so that you can send commands to it. Now, send the ‘Erase’ command; if for some reason your device isn’t connected at that moment, the command will go through the next time it’s connected to the Internet. But remember that once the data is wiped, the connection to the device will be gone, and you won’t be able to find it again.